World's Most Amazing Videos: Volume One

Every purchase you make through these Amazon links supports DVD Verdict's reviewing efforts. Thank you!

All Rise...

Judge Kerry Birmingham takes several minutes to figure out 38 Down in this week's World's Most Amazing Crossword Puzzles!

The Charge

It's right there in the title: The world's most amazing videos.

The Case

Whether it's a symptom of society, something ingrained in human nature, or a
mixture of the two, we love watching horrible things happen to people we don't
know. Removed from anything personal or anything approaching actual human
sympathy, the voyeuristic thrill of watching really terrible things happen to
people who aren't us can be as innocuous as watching a cat fall off a television
set with narration by Bob Saget (truly the Golden Age of the genre) to the
top-this gross-outs of Fear Factor and any number of websites.

Best of all for the producers of such lowest-common-denominator dreck, it's
cheap to produce and requires little to no investment from the audience, making
it ideal for casual viewing. The audience has little interest, and so do the
creators: stuff like World's Most Amazing Videos is about as formulaic
and empty a television exercise as you're likely to find. Assembled from home
video and news footage, Most Amazing ties footage of various brushes with
death-natural disasters, vehicular accidents, stunts gone awry-together into
vaguely thematically related blocks (that theme being: Man, that guy should
totally be dead right now.) The formula is just this simple: Late voiceover
king Don LaFontaine introduces all the clips you're about to see along with
teaser footage; veteran character actor Stacy Keach narrates the necessary back
story; we see the "amazing video" happen, almost always somebody not
being horribly killed; Keach's voice returns to explain what went wrong as the
most sensationalistic bits of footage are played over and over again. Often the
survivors will appear on camera to talk about how they cheated death, were
extremely lucky, and will/won't continue to do the thing that left them with
medical bills to begin with.

This formula repeats without deviation through the five episodes included
here, resulting in nearly three and a half hours of people running, jumping,
exploding, falling, or otherwise evading death. The voiceovers and editing do
manage to provide a palpable element of drama, and the frequent on-camera
interviews from the survivors, never looking the worse for wear, keep things
from seeming like a Grand Guignol snuff film or Faces of Death (that and the lack of
reenactments. And Dr. Gross). LaFontaine provides urgency; Keach provides
gravity. That's the sole advantage that Most Amazing has over the
approximately 800 billion websites that offer similarly grotesque footage; add
in some lousy skateboarders biffing it on the pavement and a few Jackass
wannabes and it would otherwise be indistinguishable from YouTube.

Perhaps appropriately for a patchwork TV program like this, this no-frills
DVD is just as slapdash, with no extra features to speak of. The whole
enterprise is a bit suspect, a cheap show issued as a cheap DVD. The videos are
indeed pretty amazing; special effects may desensitize us, but there's no
topping the real thing playing out on camera. Even granting that, there's no
real conceivable reason to own or even rent World's Most Amazing
Videos—threateningly subtitled "Volume One"—when the
same kind of vicarious thrills can be found with any decent internet connection
or by turning on any random, undiscerning basic cable channel. When you can find
your disasters as cheap as free, material like World's Most Amazing
Videos makes a case for discarding the cheap and going for the free.